1y ago

What is something you dislike but still begrudgingly use?

This question was inspired by my hatred of Temporal Anti-Aliasing which, in many games nowadays, is poorly used as a performance bandaid. On lower resolutions it will smudge and blur the image and certain bad cases of TAA will cause visible ghosting.

Yet in spite of all this, certain games won't let you turn it off or have hair/fur/foliage look like dogshit without it so sometimes I still use it.

276 comments

Amazon basically.
Some things are near impossible to get in a reasonable time frame, or get shipped from China anyway if i get them at the source.
- Also returns aren't a maze of bullshit and return fees like many other online sites.
  
  Amazon sucks but their return/refund policies are amazing. I pretty much never have to worry about a lost or missing package.
- Even if I'm going to buy the thing from a different ruthless conglomerate, I often check Amazon just to look at more reviews first.
- I manage to live without Amazon. I just pretend it doesn't exist, I don't know if it's cheaper or quicker on Amazon as I don't see it (I use a search engine that can block results). It's also probably other aspects of my life that also make it possible, spare money, spare time, no kids, live in a city.

Youtube.
- You should try Piped.
  
  And Freetube!
  
  How's the recommendations algorithm on piped?
- Any plans to stop using it?
  
  Nope. Lots of good content on there

My vote goes to Google, to whom I am tightly married. It's ecosystem and interconnectivity between apps as well as devices is unbeatable. It's super reliant.
It's the one entity that can wreck my online and offline presence. I mean, I use android and Google to login everywhere. If Mr. Google so decrees, my phone could wipe and google account be gone tomorrow. Same applies to Apple and Microsoft, but I don't use their systems as much. The poison I picked is Google and I hate it.
- I feel like I don't use that many Google services (mostly because I'm not convinced they won't shut down), but the ones I do use are the ones that would really suck to lose access to. I realized this a few months ago and have at least been working on moving my email away from Gmail to my own domain since that is the critical one that could screw everything up.
  
  I moved to protonmail years ago for this reason, but then my friend gave me a free paid YouTube account so I created a new Gmail account and found a new love for heavy metal. Since then the algorithm has learnt my tastes so well I would be devastated to lose my account, but I made a pact with myself that if my friend ever decided to ditch her account that I wouldn't pay for my own. So I'm totally at the mercy of her whims, and she doesn't even know!
- In the last months I tried to cut as many Google services as I could. I use the Proton suite now, it's nice.
  Unfortunately I still heavily rely on them for Android phone and TVs... Not to mention YouTube, which is yet to have a good competitor.
- Sent from my pixel 6

Windows
- I like Windows, it's MS that I hate and the bullshit they add to Windows.
  
  I hate to break it to you, but the stuff MS added to Windows comprises literally all of Windows.
  
  I've always felt theres multiple sides to Microsoft. Theres devs making a damn good and simple product. Then comes the enterprise devs that over-engineer the product. Then theres the marketing coming in and try to buy up competition or bundle the product with other products to force it on people (MS way of advertising). And THEN the suits either ruin the product for money or shutting it down for not either making enough money or for not helping their enterprise products make money (like for example VSCode is a product that helps MS make money on Azure).
  
  Windows 7 was a fantastic operating system.
  Windows 7 was fourteen years ago.
  
  Stockholm Syndrome...

WhatsApp
- Absolutely, it's essentially required in Europe... but also, fuck Facebook.
- Surprisingly hard for people to accept, if you don't have it.
  
  I really wish I could get out of using WhatsApp, but it's all everyone ever uses.
  And there just isn't any good enough argument you can use to convince the average user from doing otherwise. Unless it literally makes the phone explode in your hands, people will not change.
  
  I didn't have it for ages but it just resulted in people "texting" me and me never getting it because they actually sent me a WhatsApp
- They will fall, the enshittification has already begun with the integration of influencer-related groups.
- I think WhatsApp is still fantastic. Just a matter of time till Facebook incorporates it fully in. That is what worries me.
  
  I won't deny it is working very well. It is the Facebook part for me too

Facebook. I never willingly go on it, but my friends all use it for events and shit. It’s funny hanging out with them and having someone mention things from a group chat I’ve never even touched. I absolutely refuse to install that fucking malware they call Messenger.
Other than that, anything Google. Have to use it all for work.
- So many small businesses have a Facebook page and no website which is quite frustrating too. I just want to see your hours, why did I need to sign up to another website to do that?
  
  Google Maps is normally good for hours if they actually have a physical location.
- I’ve recently been trying to de-Google my life. I used to be all in on them, but they’ve changed and so have I.
  And yea Facebook sucks, but it’s how I can keep some semblance of social interaction by lurking what other people are doing. 😭
- I finally converted my friends over to discord a few years ago, and even then I'm looking to move off of discord. But it was like pulling teeth getting them to leave messenger
- I told myself I would never install it until it became the only option for keeping in touch with a girl I like. But hey as long a that's all I use it for, they can't glean that much info from me, right? Right?

Discord. Too many people and communities on it that won't use Matrix.
- I'm sorry but Discord and Matrix both suck. They are no place for a community. They're places for a group of friends to chat and hang out, not a place for large discussions. They have a large amount of random crap mixed in with actually relevant info and they both aren't indexed by any search engines. IMO, traditional forums or even Lemmy and Reddit are far better for that.
- What stops me from moving away from discord is the in-server game streaming. If something ever shows up with performance parity on that and the possibility of spinning up my own server I’ll drop discord in a second. So far I haven’t found it

Almost anything Google. I have an Android because I hate the restrictions of iOS, but forcing me to sell my location to Google if I want to know where I am (even in an open source app because location is a system thing).
- Ah man it's depressing watching the fall of google. From my gmail beta account which was incredible to do no evil, google are great, theyre open, to so many cancelled projects replaced by similar ones(ehem chats and video chats) and so much bad behavior with their ads.
- If you don't want that, you should look into microG. It replaces Google Play Services with an open source reimplementation, so apps that use it and stuff like location still work but without actually talking to Google. If an app uses Google Maps, it will instead use OpenStreetMap, for example. There's a version of LineageOS, which ships without Google stuff and instead with microG and F-Droid as well.
  
  MicroG is not exactly secure or privacy friendly if you continue using the same services.
  Pootly my thing is a Google Pixe phone, as these now dont have a headphone jack anymore and are from Google, but for GrapheneOS
- GrapheneOS! The catch is you need to buy a google pixel.
- Look into custom ROMs, there's a few degoogled privacy focused ROMs but support depends on ur mobile. You can also degoogle it yourself but can be quite time consuming.

Several things from Google.
Google Maps - none of the OSM-bases options are there yet. I need traffic conditions and good Android Auto support. At the same time I hate that Google Maps is so full of ads. When I search for "breakfast" and the top result is a sponsored result for Dunkin and the closest is 50 miles away...
YouTube - the content is there so it's hard to go to an alternative.
Google Photos - my issue with this is really more tied to Gmail. If I stop paying for more Drive storage for my photos, I will stop receiving email because my account is full. But I did switch away from Gmail at least.
- Check out piped.video. It's content of youtube without youtube. That means no recommendatios based on their algorythm, which might be nice sometimes but it's a good alternative. LibreTube for an Android app is what I use.
  Ente seems good Google Photos alternative, but you do have to pay for it (they have like 1GB free space)
  
  Yeah I use SmartTube on my TV and piped on my phone but I still count that as "using YouTube."
- It also sucks they offered unlimited free photo hosting then reneged.
  
  No they didn't. They offered unlimited free photo hosting for the Pixel 1. Which I still make use of. Later pixel generations got free unlimited uploads for 2 years.
- Isn't Waze better, functionalitywise, than google maps? I dont think they are any better on ethical fronts, but still better to use the less powerful evil...
  
  I mean it's still Google.
  
  It is but Waze is owned by Google.
- I deleted my Google account recently and I agree that Google maps is in a league of their own. I now use Magic Earth in my car, but searching for something is not as good as Google maps. But so far the realtime traffic info is good

A car running on fossil fuel.
Well fossil fuel in general…

modern internet
- This one wins

I hate that there's an app for everything, it's like when everything wanted your fuckin email now they want an app plus your email and a phone number, I have having to download POS apps on my phone for simple things that can be done from a browser, like concert tickets.
- YES! This is my number one pet peeve. I am so fucking tired of having to install an app just to use my new e-scooter, or light bulb, or to use 100 new different functions that would work perfectly well on your website if you weren't such a fucking money grubbing troglodyte.
- I work in marketing and it legitimately has no downside to a business other than having one team to make sure it works and the other to make it look good. It makes sense to not have to pay Google or Adobe or whatever other tech company that charges for web usage and ad tracking. At the same time, it allows companies a direct connection to you through push notifications.
- https://youtu.be/mzb355qT8RI
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/mzb355qT8RI
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Amazon. I try to buy elsewhere most of the time but other sites just don't have the same stuff sometimes.
- Delivery is fast, prices are right, and they have an excellent return policy. Also Ive had many moments where I try to go to a store and thanks to this post digital retail apocalypse world we live in their selection is limited compared to what it would have had 10 years ago.
- It took some work and sometimes we pay a little more but we cut Amazon out of our lives.
- \ Yep.
- Prime is just too good if you happen to use Amazon's other products. Free overnight delivery on Whole Foods items, that's literally 4-6 hour delivery sometimes. Access to Prime Videos which (very) occasionally has a show I want to watch. And a free Twitch subscription which I use to toss creators I like a few extra bucks every month.

Socks. If I'm at home you'll never see me wearing socks, not even if it's -5°C out there. But got to use them while wearing shoes, I guess.
- I hate socks and shoes. Something to do with being on the spectrum. I go barefoot, or wear thongs (flip flops) or crocs if I have to wear something. I pretty much only wear shoes/boots when mowing the lawn.
- Really? I'm the opposite. My feet are usually always freezing even if it's warm outside! So I wear socks.
  
  Not OP, I don't hate socks but they actually make my feet cold indoor sometimes
- I don't mind socks but I hate shoes and I don't like dirty socks. The sandals I wear all the time have a toe thong so no "socks with sandals" for me.

Capitalism

Google.
Reddit - I don't post there any more, but sometimes I still end up there looking for answers and information.
BUT most of all:
LinkedIn - This platform is built to benefit companies, employers and managers, not the masses of people scrambling to use it to get noticed and build their careers. There are so many things that bug me about LinkedIn, but ONE is definitely that I have no real options NOT to use it (without suffering terrible economic penalties if I you know, don't want to give them my data). I get resentful and anxious every time I look at it.
- If you work in IT, LinkedIn is just another spam source.
- I deleted my account the first time they were hacked. So much fluff and fake networking. Any employer that relies on that shit is a place I don't want to be.

Browsers. Firefox hasnt given me reason to doubt. Yet. And I find that odd. Still uses it. Because every other big browser have given me reasons.
Generally "free" stuff from big companies is giving me more and more the heebie-jeebies. Even if they have good reputation. But there's NO WAY I could ever pay for everything I use. Nor donate to every deserving person who has given their free time to create and publish FOSS.
- Mozilla really pushes Pocket through Firefox. I've gone through the about:config to get rid of it. Pocket gives me doubts.
  
  They also push their VPN a lot. Every week or two I open Firefox and they send me to their VPN page on their website telling me to try it.
  Like no. I'm not interested in paying for a rebranded mullvad.
  
  I was a huge fan of Read It Later, which became Pocket.
  I absolutely fucking refuse to use what it has turned into.
  
  I think I'd use Pocket more if I could export from into a selfhosted app.
- Should look into the ladybug browser firefox while the only "decent" browser isn't great nether and ladybug looks really promising

money

YouTube. I wish they made better decisions about how to run the platform,.
- It being free is only barely enough incentive to use it. If they ever have effective anti-adblock and force users to watch five ads before every video, I'm gone. I will never give any money to a monopolistic company if I don't have to.
- You might be interested in trying out the grayjay app
- They are making great decisions for their customers and stakeholders.

It's not just one thing. I can easily whip up a list:
Cars - they strangle out the city and make our urban communities dystopias
MS Office - I can mostly avoid it, but every time I have to use it, WTF?
Java - the syntax is fine. It's the whole universe of build/config/versioning tools that gets me
Pure Capitalism - I'm ready to protest the hell out until we get some democratic socialism
First Past the Post Voting - It just degrades into a two party lockdown

Google, YouTube, Gmail, chrome.
- Duck Duck Go, Grayjay, Protonmail, Firefox.
  
  Nebula is great too!

Facebook because my family is on it.
- I can manage to skip FB altogether, but 99% of my friends and family are on Messenger
- We have a group chat going that’s been pretty successful. My brother left Facebook first and that made it easier for me.

YouTube, Amazon, Comcast Internet, and my employer. In fact, all employers.

Windows
- How else would you get natural light into your house?
  
  Skylights?

Cars

Social media. I use some begrudgingly and most others I avoid like the plague.
- What social medias are you disappointed in and which ones do you use begrudgingly
  On certain platforms such as reddit you can still access the site without a account
- Interestingly you signed up to a new social media platform in recent months. If you disliked it that much then you'd just continue to use the ones you were already on before you decided you hated them.

Single use plastics 🤮

my body

Cars, even if I use public transports and my bike as much as possible, I still have to use it sometimes
Supermarkets, I try to buy things elsewhere but it's not always possible...

The internet

I waste time every day watching YouTube shorts.
The way it's designed, you can see a little bit of the next short, and the curiosity will get me, i'm always really tempted to scroll and find out what the next one is.
I wouldn't intentionally waste time like this, which is why i haven't installed TikTok; but i do watch YouTube every day, and so shorts come get me where i am. And honestly, it's a garbage experience. Part of me thinks i would probably have more fun on TikTok because their algorithm is better. Shorts keeps giving me these channels that edit bits of podcats, often MrBeast and Joe Rogan, and there's loads of channels doing this so i keep seeing it no matter how many i block. What content i do enjoy is drowned out by a lot of trash content like that, and would probably be better in long form anyway.
- disable Shorts with Revanced: https://revanced.app/patches?pkg=com.google.android.youtube&s=shorts

iPhone. I travel a lot and I had my bags lost three times. Well no more thanks to AirTags.
We don’t know where your bag is, come back tomorrow and try . I understand you overworked and underpaid but my bag right behind that wall. Oh look it was.
This is only thing reason why I keep using it. I am not going to be hater . For some people it is a great phone but gods on high the limits all over the place.
Here is app drawer. Great can I change Categories? Nope have fun if an app is wrong category. At least I can change what icon gets big? Nope.
The keyboard? Where is the bloody , or ? Button? On android I can have button that lets me pick any of those. But not here I have to go into an under keyboard. But you can have auto prediction on! Not once have it given me a question mark during this whole rant.
The spellcheck. This is probably me being dumb but god, how do I correct? It doesn’t seem to work if I click the word it doesn’t work if I use spacebar to guide it to end of a word. Only seems to work if I somehow managed to click at the end of the word.
The first party cable missing the basic thing pretty much every 3 party cable using to prevent the cable from breaking but no need to 3d print option for it.
The lockdown. Now this maybe obsidian but I will blame Apple. I love lockdown and I probably should not use it yada yada. But why can’t I just a bloody list of all apps and white lists what I want? No instead I have do a big song and dance with sync on obsidian for over 3 hour’s then just one day it works and shows up.
- I've used ios quite a bit and have many, many complaints. But you just reminded me of one. My work has two ipads for us to use in the field. One is the biggest sized model, the other is a mini. The password has an exclamation point. For one iPad, the exclamation point is in the first page of symbols. The other is two pages back. Like what the fuck
- Google is rolling out their own find device network soon™ with third party trackers that are rechargeable. They're pushing it through play services too so every android phone in the world will be in the network too, so it's a much more global network if you are traveling off the beaten path.
  
  Some people especially with older devices might not like the constant telemetry in the background...

Holy crap, Lois. Where do I even begin?
Microsoft on my desktop. Want to try out Linux but even boomers would make fun of my tech skills. That, and more games are on Windows.
Cars. Born in bumfuck nowhere, and cities with public transit are expensive as hell. If I ever get a better paying job, I'm selling that shit and moving anyways, because cars are also a huge money sink in and of themselves.
Google. I'll give them props, it's a good search engine even in its enshittified form, some of the ads I can deal with because if I am looking for a new t-shirt or something, then it would make perfect sense a Uniqlo ad would pop up. But its privacy that's the problem, and I try to be as "normal" as possible in this KiwiFarmsified hellscape. In the panopticon, the winning strategy is to not be interesting.
My iphone (inb4 avocado toast Venezuela). It would be silly to trash this thing now by principle, but once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
YouTube. It's a Monopoly and my broke ass doesn't want to subscribe to curiosity stream. It's like Texas though, while it's mostly derivative cringe, there's small pockets of gold that keep me there.
Linkedin. Pretentious garbage
Suburban life. Again, I am not a suburbanite by choice, decent paying jobs are tight and it's even harder to find an apartment in a state I know I probably won't be killed in AND I can afford.
TL;DR: I REALLY need to start learning 2 tech so I can navigate tech alternatives. Oh, and I need to get my shit together in life so I can afford to live in a blue city.
- Linux: try installing virtualbox and messing around with it so that you know what you're getting into before having to make the jump. You dont have to go all in in the beginning. Spin up a virtual machine and play around and see if you are able to migrate any of your work to that.
  Google: once you migrate off gmail everything gets way way easier. DuckDuckGo is easily better then google for all search results other then maps and youtube
  Cars: not a car replacement, but ebikes are fun/addicting as shit and allow you to go 4x as far and fast as a regular bike without being totally sweaty at your destination. Again not a total car replacement, but it has replaced many vehicular activities and drastically cut down on me burning fossil fuels
- Google
  Startpage uses Google on the back-end but keeps your searches anonymous. Or there's always DuckDuckGo.
  My iphone [...] once when its unusable, I'm going for a Linux Pinephone.
  Don't, it's not ready yet unless all you do is call and text. (Then it's fine ig)
  Windows
  Try out a live USB, it won't save anything you do to it and you won't risk deleting your data by accident (like with dual boot). All you need is an old USB stick / flash drive (just make sure it's big enough, a few Gigabytes should be good)
  Here's a walkthrough for Linux Mint (an Ubuntu alternative). I'd recommend specifically Mint Cinnamon (Download Link):
  https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-live-usb/
- Ubuntu is not hard to install. I think there's even an installer for Windows that you can download.

anything proprietary

Human interaction.

JavaScript.
- Just within software development:
  JS (I'm using TS everywhere now).
  Php (old project I'm hoping we're getting rid of).
  VB (old code was somewhy written in VB).
  MySQL (feels like Oracle doesnt really care about its C# connectors).
  SQL-queries directly in code (I'm pushing as hard as I can for any kind of ORM, but somehow my fellow devs doesnt find it as practical).
- Consultants completely undocumented JavaScript. Had to convert thier entire library to typescript to even get a chance of knowing what they are doing.
  
  I just had to help convert an old undocumented JS project to TS too. Fortunately had some help from 2 other devs but it was still a nightmare. Tons of intertwined code responsibilities that we shaped up back into lanes, and broke out a metric ton of interfaces from.
  It’s much better now and has comments everywhere. It’s also earned the company record profits recently, so now I can point to it for the C-suite.

Safety bars on my power rack. I hate when the bar goes low and clanks on it and I'm always hyper aware about hitting it. But I have a home gym and I don't want to die doing anything less than a 3 plate bench.
- Straps
  
  Awesome didn't realize those even existed. Gonna grab some today.
- Cant you just put the safety bars a little lower so it only touches if you're about to fall over?
  
  I was thinking about bench press and I like to bring the bar down to my chest but then it clanks the safety. I got straps ordered and I'm hyped to put them in

alcohol, im an alcoholic

The English language.

Pants!
I should move somewhere warm.
- Thank you for your service.

Illustrator. It's industry standard for graphic design, but has the stability of a toddler on ice
- I’ve built plugins for Illustrator and other adobe projects and their internal API is trash.
  This is the company that re-deployed their entire history of support forums accumulated over decades, into a new forum software, without realizing they were breaking twenty years’ worth of links.
  Those forum posts, which took the place of their nonexistent documentation, were the community’s collective work product and the company just said “fuck it” and broke every link and bookmark anyone ever had to any obscure topic about adobe tech.
  
  Fucking.... Wow. I personally never had any luck on their shite forums, but that's terrible.
  I wish Astute Graphics would just make their own vector design program, their plugins are what make illustrator tolerable

Microsoft Windows
- Microsoft Everything.
  Boy, I sure can't wait till VSCode and GitHub become as annoying as excel to use!
  
  Data analyst here. What's your beef with excel?
- Same here I'm going eventually look into duel booting I don't hate windows exactly but I don't like it nether

Google Workspace. I have several clients who insist on using it for unknown reasons. It creates unprofessional looking work products. And in some cases, it is just plain kludgy (slicers randomly shoot themselves over the Sheet, page numbers randomly renumber when the footer is updated, etc). The part that gets me the most is that it is similar in price to other productivity suites, but often our clients opt to buy Zoom and Slack on top of that - basically doubling the price.
- I'm forced to use Google Workspace and I absolutely hate it. The document suite is so horrible when trying to do anything that isn't a basic document or spreadsheet. Gmail sucks for long email threads and anything with attachments and the search is useless. Google Chat is a barebones piece of shit compared to Slack.
  Luckily I've been able to get Microsoft Office for the things that require it, including Outlook using the GWSMO tool.
- Exporting a Google Doc to HTML creates the worst structure I've seen in a long time. They can't even export lists correctly.
  It feels like they built this in the IE6 days and never touched it again.
  My employer wanted to use it to manage privacy policies, site notices and other legal documents of our clients. Greeeeat fun when it's time to embed this stuff on a client's website.
  Either it looks like shit or I spend 1-2 hours to fix the formatting manually...

Google, this fucking phone, the cesspool of fezbuk, the shittified streaming services I can’t manage to unsubscribe from…

capitalism

Credit cards
Just a slimy middleman taking a cut of every transaction and trapping people in debt. But a bit of a tragedy of the commons because merchants raise prices to accommodate CC fees and the rewards are hard to pass up.
- Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you're kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don't, and those come at a cost. If we're talking about mom and pop shops, sure they're evil. But for a lot of consumers, they're just another tool that they shouldn't be guilty for using effectively.
- Credit cards also incentivizes more spending than other forms of payment, so the merchants that are lobbying for legislation want to have their cake and eat it too. In fact, retailers did not lower prices after the Durbin Amendment capped debit card fees. Also, you're kinda ignoring the insane amount of protections that credit cards have that debit cards and cash don't, and those come at a cost. If we're talking about mom and pop shops, sure they're evil. But for a lot of consumers, they're just another tool that they shouldn't be guilty for using effectively.

Windows. Android. Gmail. Expensive public transport.
- There are alternatives. Proton mail is a good alternative if you just want an email service provider. As for windows, you might find a right distro for you but I dont want anyone to redpill on that. As for android, there isnt any great alternatives (ios is good only when you use apple ecosystem).
  
  Sure, I'm aware of many alternatives, there just isn't enough impetus to move.
  Linux Distros in particular just never work out well for me, whenever I try and it just falls to pieces after a while and doesn't work consistently for my gaming. I have so little of the troubleshooting knowledge I have accumulated for windows across the years that I can't effectively resolve issues I encounter.
  Best I can hope for Android wise is just keeping to the custom ROMs, but they all come with the annoyances.
- tutanota is a good email client
  
  On Windows, the new version of Thunderbird is pretty good. On Android, FairEmail is my preferred app.

All my durable medical equipment like CPAP machine, DirecTV, and Walgreens for anything.

Plastic

My life

Adobe "Creative Cloud" thanks to it's monopoly in the design industry (though I am in the process of doing my first smaller client job with Inscape atm).
- Affinity
  
  yep affinity photo is great! 😃
- There's very few brands/companies that I hate with that much of a burning passion.
  People talk about Windows being monopolistic and anti-competitive all day, but Adobe might just take the cake here.
  They're so unbelievably blatant about it, if they could spit in each and every one of their users' faces, they would.

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